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To prepare for your students’ future, one of the most crucial skills to master and possess is critical thinking.
However, you might get confused on how to practice the skill in the classroom—yet in fact, it’s a much-needed skill to help students face the working world. Other repetitive skills can be replaced, but that’s not the case with critical thinking.
In this article, you will find the right ways to practice your students’ critical thinking skill. Check out the details below!
As a teacher, give your students the control to think more about their ideas. Make sure they know that it’s totally fine to analyze all their assumptions, question the possible answers, and all the contradictions.
Therefore, they can have a better and deeper understanding, and they can also explain their ideas more detailed. In a world where express and agile is a fundamental thing, teach your students that they can take everything slow. We can also appreciate other people’s ideas and opinions more.
Reasoning itself is a very important component that includes thinking critically. By reasoning, students can think logically, evaluate the evidence, and analyze arguments. They can also decide things better and solve their problems as well.
One of the many ways to teach reasoning skills is to give problem-solving activities, so they can practice the way they think. To do so, you can give out a real problem use case, and students can use their reasoning to find the solutions.
After finding the solutions, ask them to present the results in front of the class while also learning how to defend their perspectives. Then, you can see whether they get affected by other students’ opinions or not.
With all the buzz happening in the internet and all those fake websites, students should be able to choose the right information to learn selectively.
Fundamentally, students should be able to possess credibility aspect, so they can understand if the source is reliable or not. As a teacher, you should be able to teach them how to find the said resources.
When we ask open-ended questions, it really practices critical thinking skills as students are taught to deeply research to give birth to their ideas.
Even better, we can create a discussion space for students to be able to throw out their thoughts freely.
For example, two questions that you can try to ask are “How’s your approach to this problem”, or “Where can you possibly find the right resource to address this issue?”. Those two don’t focus on “the right answer”, but more of “the thinking process of the answer”.
To trigger their thoughts, students can also try journaling and write down their answers in the form of writings. That said, they can take a moment for a while to think about their thoughts and give their voice in front of the class.
The habit to share voices is one of the many ways to hone critical thinking skills. And if you don’t create a safe space, it’s going to be tough for the students to take a leap of faith.
As a teacher, when listening to your students’ thoughts, you have to practice your mindset that there’s no right or wrong answer. Therefore, there’s no need to criticize your students’ thoughts and blatantly judge if it’s right or wrong.
Your classroom should be one of the most free spaces to ask questions and raise their voices. Starting from you as a teacher, make sure to be open to differences, and invest that mindset to your students.
So, that’s all about how you can hone your students’ critical thinking skills in the classroom. Don’t forget to apply the points since critical thinking skills are supposed to be taught as early as they are.
If you need any triggers to help your students learn better, Assemblr EDU can be the right alternative to explore students’ capabilities to think critically. Give them the task related to create 3D/AR projects, let them create their own, and present the results in their own voices.
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